Update April 7: I didn’t get a chance to add this until now, but a couple of days ago I was glad to see that Laverne Cox wrote a piece on Huffington Post that included a call-out on the disrespectful reporting on Coko William’s death by Detroit’s local Fox News.

****************************************************************

Update April 4, 4:00 AM: I propose we start a twitter campaign criticizing the Fox affiliate station for putting together this disrespectful and transphobic report on Coko’s murder.

(Pointer: with kind of campaign, it’s better to use the ‘manual’ RT (copy and paste someone’s tweet into your own) rather than the ‘automatic’ RT. The first will show up in the twitter feed of Fox news while the second won’t necessarily.)

****************************************************************

Update April 4, 3:30 AM: The trans woman who was murdered yesterday in East Detroit was Coko Williams. A friend described her thusly:

“She was really a sweet, quiet girl,” said Dada, who had known Williams for the past 15 years and told BTL that she sometimes worked as a hair stylist. “She was never shady or nasty. She wasn’t that type of girl at all. She was always respectful of herself and to other people. It’s sad for her to go out the way she did.”

Last night a trans woman, likely possibly a sex worker [let me emphasize whether she was engaged in sex work or not is not clear], was murdered in a Detroit east side neighborhood. However, instead of presenting her death as a loss, local Detroit’s Fox affiliate news station chose the path of blatant disrespect and transmisogyny.

The report begins with a comment from the studio, “one person is dead after a shooting on Detroit’s East side.” They then turn to Al Allen reporting from the neighborhood where the murder took place. Strangely though, we don’t hear anything further about the murder until the last minute of the report. Instead, Allen reports,

Here along Woodward Avenue on Parkhurst … neighbors are telling Fox News crime is killing their neighborhood. They say they’ve asked for help from the city and the police countless times, but they say no one will listen.

That’s right: in a report about a human being who has recently died, the Fox local station appropriately begins the story by expressing empathy with the setting in which the person’s body was discovered.

They proceed by interviewing an anonymous 25-year neighborhood resident who holds up a picture of some garbage he once found on the ground as evidence that, as Allen says, “the neighborhood is choking on prostitution, drugs and violent crime.” The picture displayed features some “liquor, condoms, drugs and spent bullet casings.”

They proceed to interview a couple more residents who say similar things, then, applying the delicate human touch, Allen comments that at night the neighborhood, “transforms to a haven for prostitution like bees around honey.”

At about the 1:30 mark of a 2:30 minute report, they find a moment to comment on the woman who has just died, of course, misgendering her for good measure:

Neighbors say a male prostitute, killed over night, throat slashed, then shot to death. The second homicide in less than six months.

Then they drop the bombshell, interviewing neighborhood resident Durrail Sanders, who comments,

They’re dealing with another guy and the guy just happens to figure out that’s a man, and, you know, of course, something’s gonna happen.

By including this sensationalistic, extremely transmisogynistic comment in their report, Fox is promoting the idea that the woman was killed in response to the revelation of her trans status. However, considering that the woman was shot with a gun (by someone who bothers to carry around a gun in the first place) kind of suggests otherwise. That’s not exactly a conclusion that requires heavy sleuthing.

Then, perhaps attempting to display some last minute shed of integrity, Al Allen makes a final comment suggesting that it might have been robbery after all.

It’s really unfortunate that so many news outlets across the United States still don’t take the half-hour’s worth of work that is required to figure out how to report on trans people in a responsible manner. The Associated Press has adopted clear guidelines for dealing with these issues, which are presented on GLAAD’s website.

I would encourage people to contact the Detroit Fox affiliate and politely but firmly describe why this media report is so offensive, and encourage them to adopt the standards set out by the Associated Press. Alternately, Facebook users may leave comments directly on the story itself.

Finally, at the very end, Fox bothers to mention the one clue they have regarding the identity of the murderer: witnesses say the suspect escaped in a gold-colored car.

I agree with your premise that the journalist was insensitive to the lady’s sex v.s. gender identity, and the journalist should apologize.

One sidenote. You write:
“However, considering that the woman was shot with a gun (by someone who bothers to carry around a gun in the first place) kind of suggests otherwise.”
I don’t know about this observation. If the town is as seedy as the article suggests, I would think that guns were the norm. (Especially in the ‘bad parts’ of detroit.)

I guess what I was trying to say was more like, it could be any number of things, and there’s no reason to jump to this particular conclusion. I probably didn’t get it across as coherently as I could have though.

Mainly I’m bothered by the fact they included this guy’s comment that buys into the “trans panic” thing, which is the idea that a cis man meets a trans woman, they have sex until he discovers that she is trans, then he freaks out and kills her “because he can’t help himself.” That’s been used as defense to let cis men who killed trans women walk free.

For starters, that’s not a justifiable reason for killing anyone. And anyways, the reality is usually more complex than that. Even in the prototype case of this defense, which would be the murder of Gwen Araujo, there are some strong indications that the men involved knew Araujo was trans all along, even before they engaged in sexual relations with her. They just freaked out in a later point when some of their friends started asking questions and the got embarassed, then when they were put on trial they put on a big show about it “We didn’t know, we couldn’t help ourselves when we found out!” It’s pretty gross.

[…] of human life, instead airing grievances of a neighborhood man who complained of street crime and finding trash on his lawn. When the loss of human life was alluded to towards the end of the interview, Coko’s name was […]